Manufact is a new way of confirming trust within the luxury goods market. With a growing number of counterfeit products throughout multiple industries, the company offers a full traceability method that allows the consumer to confirm every single stage of the development along the supply chain, says Ali Beydoun, Founder and CEO of Manufact.
Speaking at the recent Blockchain in Business Conference held in Sydney, Beydoun said that this includes everything from the manufacturing of the product down the supply chain to the end consumer.
“It is no secret today that we’re very susceptible to hacking, and we’ve been seeing that, especially here in Australia in the last few weeks with big corporations such as Medibank and Optus – and who knows who else is next,” Beydoun said.
“These companies spend millions of dollars to create layers and layers of security, that is just legacy technology. It just allows it to be hacked. Blockchain, on the other hand, is immutable, and each dollar that goes up can never be erased. And it goes hand-in-hand with what we’re trying to achieve with full traceability.”
The luxury market and scalability
Beydoun noted that Manufact is targeting the luxury goods market, with a focus on high-end brands in particular, as they are particularly susceptible to counterfeiting and fraud.
He provided the example of the luxury perfume market, a niche sector with production overseen by just a few fashion houses. These perfumes are prime targets as counterfeiters and thieves tamper with bottles or just outright replace them.
“We all know that there are thousands of luxury brands out there that are just constantly being counterfeited, be it bags or perfumes. So we’re looking at all this in great detail and working out a method that allows us to track it from basically the raw materials right down to consumption.
“What we’re trying to do is approach millions of products at a time. If our method per product cost a dollar, and a company had a million products, it wouldn’t stack up financially. The economy of scale has been the major factor in choosing BSV.”
A misunderstanding about blockchain
Beydoun said that blockchain is still relatively misunderstood and noted that it’s still in the early stages of adoption and development.
“There’s a large room for disruption given that most of our systems are still using legacy technology. I don’t think it would be such a lousy disruption in the sense that migrating data from legacy to blockchain would be an issue.
“Hopefully with Manufacut, what we’re trying to do is plug into companies rather than change the whole system. However, in terms of costs, there will be a major disruption to the methods currently used.”
